Just Beyond my Reach

I sometimes get a feeling that there exists something just beyond my reach. It's not quite a sense of déjà vu, but a general sense that there is more to a street, moment, or song than I can fully experience at a particular moment. When I think of where I'd like to live in five or ten years, I have a very distinct image in my head of a house on a very green street where the neighbours have trees in their front yards. But the image doesn't vary. It's always the same street and layout in my head, but I swear I've never seen a street just like that before.

Then when Amanda and I were driving home from Scrabble night at her parents' house, a song I'd never heard before was playing on the radio. But one of the instrumental bits (again, completely unfamiliar) struck a chord in me.

I think about living in a tall condo in a rainy city and carrying an umbrella to work every day. I daydream about driving off into the endless prairie with Amanda by my side. There are all of these things that feel so real, as if I experienced them during my life, but there's no way I could have. So either I can believe in reincarnation and that I'm remembering snippets of a previous life, or I can believe that there's another world on the borders of this one, and that when the conditions are right, the barrier between the two isn't quite so opaque.

Of course, it could all be nonsense. It could be that these are things that I saw or heard just briefly without thinking about them, and my subconscious keeps trying to remind me that yes, I did see that street, and yes, Amanda and I did drive to Edmonton together and parts of it felt like a drive into an endless prairie. But when that street, and that condo in the rainy city, are so vivid and real, the nonsense diagnosis is sometimes the hardest to believe.